


The Finer Details

by Star_Crow



Category: The 100 (TV)
Genre: F/M, Future Fic, Healing, Laughter, Married Couple, canonverse
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-05-29
Updated: 2017-05-29
Packaged: 2018-11-06 09:01:35
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,638
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11032983
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Star_Crow/pseuds/Star_Crow
Summary: It took Clarke a while to realise that she’d never heard Bellamy laugh. Really laugh. Clarke had always thought that Bellamy was beyond expressive for a man; his happiness like a stifling summer heatwave, his anger a terrifying storm and yet he’d never shown her the most obvious reaction to joy.





	The Finer Details

It took Clarke a while to realise that she’d never heard Bellamy laugh. Really laugh. Clarke had always thought that Bellamy was beyond expressive for a man; his happiness like a stifling summer heatwave, his anger a terrifying storm and yet he’d never shown her the most obvious reaction to joy. It seemed like something she should have noticed; she’d lived side-by-side with him from the moment she stepped out of that dropship but it had slipped past her for all this time. 

Bellamy hadn’t laughed once since they’d met. Not for her, not for the rest of the delinquents. Not even for Octavia.

Clarke decided to ask her one night. It had been a long day, Arkadia stocking up for the looming Earthen winter. Only she and Octavia were still awake, sitting opposite one another at the pit.

“Does Bellamy ever laugh?”

The question surprised her, whetstone poised in the warrior’s palm. She looked up at Clarke across the dimming flames, washing her tired face in a gentle orange glow. Life had been hard for Octavia since she was born but never more so than now. Clarke wondered on more than one occasion how she got through each day, knowing she’d never see Lincoln again, trying to make amends with her elder brother whilst having to look at the marks on his face every time she saw him. Scars she’d put there herself.

Octavia held Clarke’s gaze for a moment before dropping it slowly, as if she herself was ashamed of the answer.

“He used to. Back before Mom died. He was never the same after she was floated,” Octavia sighed, returning to her sword, skimming the stone over the edge of the blade. “Something in him just … broke.”

“We’re all broken,” Clarke murmured, throwing another log into the fire pit. “But he was first.”

Octavia didn’t look up again, her hazel eyes insistently following the stone in her hand instead, but Clarke could see the girl well enough. Could see the sad agreement reflected in the firelight. Octavia got up soon after that, sword strapped to her back. Clarke thought that she’d just gone to her cabin. 

She realised otherwise when she saw Bellamy searching for his beloved sister the next morning. She could see it in his face that he knew. Knew that Octavia had left him this time, wasn’t coming back, couldn’t live with him anymore. That too much had happened and he couldn’t fix it for her.

Bellamy came to her later, snuck into her cabin in the dead of night so none of the others would see him. Clarke knew she couldn’t make him smile and she expected nothing of the sort. All she could do was let him rage until it petered out into a special kind of pain, a raw hurt that was specific to Bellamy. She let him cry on her, let him tell her stories about O until the morning began lurking on the horizon.

“We have to go.” she whispered to him, the rising sun lighting his messy curls into molten gold. 

He blinked at her, rubbing away the tracks from under his eyes. “I know.” 

Clarke had let him sleep beside her for the night but it wasn’t like that. Couldn’t be like that. Whatever was between them was simply far beyond the realms of a normal couple’s love, far more personal than any sex could ever be. Clarke doubted there was anyone in Arkadia that could understand it. Better that no one knew.

She shifted to get out of bed, get dressed, have a wash, do anything to get moving, before he caught her hand tightly. 

“Clarke,” he murmured, brushing a tangled blonde locked from her forehead, the traces of his fingers light as a bird’s wing against her skin. “I-”

“Don’t thank me, Bellamy,” she cut him off, gripping his hand strongly. “Don’t ever thank me for this. You would do the same. Wouldn’t you?”

Those painfully unique dark eyes studied her for a moment before he nodded minutely, leaning his head back against the pillows. “Always.”

She sat with him for a moment, keeping her hand entwined with his, despite the growing heat between their palms. Bellamy’s hands were far bigger than hers and yet they never seemed to conquer hers, only sit beside.

“I want you to do something for me. Promise me it, even.” Clarke loosened her fingers from his, stretching them out against his instead, palm-to-palm. “It doesn’t have to be today, or tomorrow, or the day after, whenever you feel like you can. If you never feel like you can then that’s fine but-”

“Just tell me, Clarke.”

“I want you to promise that, one day, you’ll try to laugh again. It doesn’t matter when or what for. I just want to hear it. Once.”

It took him a while to reply, as if he were struggling with himself on the inside. “There’s not much to laugh about, Princess.” he said hoarsely.

Clarke shook her head. “Maybe not yet, but what are you fighting for, Bell, if not for a future where there is something to be happy for?”

He looked out of the window, somehow keeping his eyes wide even in the glaring sun beams. “I’m not sure what I’m fighting for, Clarke. I always thought I fought for O but,” Bellamy tried yet again to swallow the lump in his throat. “I don’t think I am anymore.”  
Bellamy returned his eyes to Clarke. “What’s left?”

“Me,” Clarke replied firmly. “If nothing else, if you have to, you fight for me. Got it, Blake?”

For the first time in days, she made him smile.

“Got it, Griffin. Laughing is now on top of my to-do list. I promise.”

It took him years to keep his promise to Clarke. Octavia was right; a part of Bellamy had died with his mother and he couldn’t ever get that back. What Bellamy did learn, that his sister never did, was that just because one part was destroyed, it didn’t mean that something else could not grow in its place. 

He and Clarke never announced a romantic relationship to anyone. It had evolved so slowly that no one had ever noticed the change. There simply was no need to discuss it. There wasn’t a word that could cover it, either. Bellamy and Clarke simply were.  
In honesty, Clarke had always expected to get her laugh at the most cliche of moments. First kiss, first sex, engagement, wedding, first pregnancy, but it never came. He smiled more often, a lot more once she told him she was going to have their baby, but Bellamy’s laugh still eluded her. Clarke could almost believe that he was deliberately keeping it from her. 

When she finally did hear his laugh, she wasn’t prepared for it at all.

They were out in the rover together, more than eight years after their dropship landed, hunting for game in a fresh territory that the Commander had allowed them. Bellamy was trying so hard not to be possessive of Clarke, now she was pregnant, but he couldn’t help himself sometimes. Clarke was supposed to have gone out with Miller on that day but Bellamy switched his shifts on the quiet so he could stay with her. Clarke wasn’t sure whether she found his antics endearing, annoying, or somewhere in between, but she didn’t raise an issue with him then. 

In truth, Clarke always felt calmer, safer, when he was around but she avoided telling him that too much. She’d never hear the end of it.

She and Bellamy had been walking along the northern Skaikru boundary when they saw it. 

A deer, just like the one they’d seen when they first landed. Except this one wasn’t disfigured. It was perfect, like the ones Clarke had seen in the books on the Ark, had tried to draw on her cell wall. The buck’s fallow coat and glossy hooves gleamed in the hazy daylight. Its antlers were the most impressive thing Clarke had ever seen; long, pointed works of art that wound far above the creatures head. The male was alone, grazing contentedly on a patch of dewy grass beside a willow tree. Clarke was sure neither of them was breathing when they saw that damn deer. The moment was so surreal that Clarke wasn’t sure she could have dreamed it. She wished she could have drawn the buck right there but she didn’t get her chance. It ran off. Because Bellamy Blake laughed.

She didn’t even comprehend it straight away, more furious that the sudden noise had scared off the first healthy deer she’d ever seen. The shock of hearing Bellamy laugh took away any frustration Clarke had ever had about losing the buck.

Bellamy’s laugh was somehow everything she’d imagined it’d be and yet completely different at the same time. His laugh was transcendent, fitting with the world around him as if he were part of nature itself. As Clarke listened to him, it was like the whole world was too. Bellamy’s laugh was deep, husky, much like his normal voice, but so loud. As loud as you’d expect for somehow that hadn’t truly laughed for years. 

It was also ridiculously infectious. Clarke couldn’t help but let out the warm bubble which had swollen in her chest. She laughed with him. She had to.

This meant something. The deer they’d seen showed that their world was finally beginning to repair. That their sacrifice wasn’t in vain. That their descendants had a chance for something far better than they’d had. 

That was the bigger picture but Clarke was an artist. Clarke was always interested in the finer details, the hidden meanings in the images around her. The deer. The laugh. It all meant one thing to her.

Bellamy Blake was healing.


End file.
